Proxy

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To give you a brief outline of this movie’s warped developing drama:

Melanie is an attention whore living in dull domesticity needing to enrich her life by attending grief counseling groups dealing with loss of their children. Melanie still has her husband and son yet tells those in the group they died in a car wreck thanks to a drunk driver!  Melanie meets the lost Esther, a lesbian who was pregnant and lured her obsessive, crude, and hostile lover named Anika into using a brick to attack her baby while still in the womb and nearly at full term. Esther was leaving the doctor’s office after a sonogram. We are led to believe that some sicko just assaults her and attacks the unborn baby. We see that this was all a plan when the lovers are together. Esther becomes infatuated with Melanie, soon learning of her lie and believing this is a desire of hers to actually literally be freed of her domesticity. So Esther will take it upon herself to do just that. Melanie’s son is considered by Esther to be that burden to get rid of. Well this spurns a sequence of events that further accentuates just how fucked up these characters really are.

 Anika has always been so attracted and attached to Melanie because of how off she is. A real enigma, I think we rarely truly know what goes on behind those vacant eyes. While it looks like nothing much is going on behind them, I do think, nonetheless, that her mind is probably loud and active. The other main character is Melanie’s husband. He factors very little until Esther’s actions change his life forever. The marriage was an obvious lost cause with little communication or joy even prior to Esther’s arrival and intrusion in their lives bringing tragedy and further woe. Esther, in her confusion and delusion, believed her method of execution was to allow her and Melanie to be together. Hubby, though, wasn’t about to allow Esther to receive this grandiose act of misplaced and misunderstood devotion. Then Anika comes looking for revenge, with twistedly dark plans to get even for taking Esther away from her. Melanie wants her attention, craves for eyes on her, aches for ears listening to her (even if her words are pre-planned falsities) and imagines that if she can set in motion a series of events that will provide a platform for her to gain such focus towards her then her agenda will be quite a success. Melanie even momentarily visualizes a fantasy where she has a book on her false heroism after losing her family to two lesbian intruders at different times as talk shows and the media provide the very platform she covets!

Two hours is just too long. The plot of this movie could easily fit in 90 minutes. There’s not much in this film that couldn’t fit into a Lifetime marathon about needy, unhappy women doing bad things. Anika is a foul-mouthed, prison-mainstay, in-your-face, confrontational ark of pissed-off aggression. Esther is a significant part of her world. Melanie, although she didn’t quite know it, was a rival for Esther’s affections. Because of their friendship, Esther was removed from Anika, and Melanie is viewed as the culprit. There’s a lot of concealment and false information, pretending and clinging urges for companionship and to be noticed, central and an integral focus during any conversation.

This is more or less a psychological melodrama or perhaps better put a “psycho-drama”, with Kristina Klebe (Rob Zombie’s Halloween) as you might never have seen her. She like this unfiltered and devil may care blunt force object with no regard for how anyone might view her personality or behavior. Alexia Rasmussen is the Marion Crane of Proxy. She is center stage during the first half of the film. The second half features the repercussions caused by Esther. A crime committed affects those directly hurt by it. Then Melanie, her husband, and Anika close the second half. Alexa Havins as Melanie wears masks whenever she feels the need to manipulate and to satiate her hunger for attention. Joe Swanberg is primarily skulking or angry; this is because he doesn’t appear much until his son is taken from him as he deals with his loss, soon learning of what his wife has been up to while he’s away to work. If anyone is a threat to Melanie’s ideal of a family unit or throws a monkey wrench into her life which could push her into a spotlight to reveal the negative ugliness of her true self then desperation results in violence. You see that at the end. The distasteful murder of the child through an attack from a brick is a shocker. The admittance of its reasoning left me repulsed. These characters in this movie are not forthcoming in warming your heart. They are consumed with fulfilling their desires…people typically get hurt as a result.

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